The Jewish “Talented Tenth”: The Jewish Identities of Undergraduates at Elite Institutions

• In Event: Whither Jewish College Students?

Abstract

The challenge of fostering Jewish identity and a sense of communal responsibility among Jewish young adults and especially among those identified as “the best and the brightest” has become a central issue in communal discourse. The recent recently published Portrait of Jewish Americans (Pew Research Center, 2013) highlighted several trends among Jewish Millennials, including a diminished propensity to embrace Judaism as a religion and to engage in both religious and secular forms of Jewish life.
This paper will focus on explicating how undergraduates at elite institutions of higher education “negotiate” their Jewish identities within their institutional and generational contexts. Contemporary Jewish young adults are part of the population cohort known as the Millenials, characterized by their disconnection from conventional institutions, liberal outlook and full embrace of digital media (Pew Research Center, 2014). In their book The App Generation, Howard Gardner and Katie Davis (2013) describe this generation’s preference for individualism and self-focus and their tendency to “think of the world as an ensemble of apps, to see their lives as a string of ordered apps.”
Jewish students at elite universities excel along multiple dimensions and come to the college with already well established records of accomplishment. Describing the demanding schedules of Harvard undergraduates, Craig Lambert of Harvard Magazine wrote that they “routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant helpings of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments” (2010).
The findings to be presented are based on analysis and reanalysis of several streams of qualitative and quantitative data, including in-depth studies of Jewish life at two elite institutions of higher education, evaluation of programming for elite Jewish college students, and research on Taglit-Birthright Israel applicants and participants. This paper will explore questions about the Jewish identity of undergraduates at elite institutions such as how do these undergraduates think and talk about their Jewish identities and what is the salience and valence of their Jewish identities? How salient are the Jewish aspects of identity in activities and relationships that comprise the “life space” of undergraduates at elite institutions?

authors

• Matthew E. Boxer, Brandeis University

• Fern Chertok, Brandeis University